It’s rather foolish to believe that even a ‘bullet wound’ would alter Donald Trump. His speech accepting the nomination for the Republican Party on Thursday night – over 90 minutes – proved that.  What you see is what you get. But let me reflect for a moment on the consequences for Trump, and the political system, of this attempt on his life.  Its impact it seems on American politics, and more particularly on the Trump third presidential run – well, at least for the moment, appears rather negligible. As Susan B. Glasser of The NewYorker wrote:

Trump’s supposed pivot to the center was silly spin, and yet all week long I marvelled at the collective susceptibility to this narrative, so seductive, so absurd. … Soon enough on Thursday night, the audience was back to its comfort zone, booing as Trump criticized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and warned that the hated Democrats were “destroying our country,” cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the “China virus” and the “plunder” of our nation by rapacious foreigners. The second coming of George Herbert Walker Bush this was not.

He may have had a brush with death but he has not been reborn. He is the same Trump, only four years older, angrier, and far, far more incoherent than anyone who has any business being President of the United States. If Biden can’t beat him, then surely someone else can—and must.

Okay, so it was, I suspect, a rather a vain hope. But it is worth reflecting here on the incident and what it says about American political violence. It certainly appears that many view the shooting – public and commentators alike – as being strongly linked to political violence in the United States. Numerous commentators reprised repeated views and analysis that first reflected on heightened political polarization in the US body politic and then suggesting the tie to instances of political violence. Foreign Affairs reflected on this causal chain with an interview with Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins,  who with his colleague from Cornell, Suzanne Mettler in 2020 had written an FA piece titled, “The Fragile Republic: American Democracy Has Never Faced So Many Threats All at Once”. In that piece the two argued:

Polarization is not a static state but a process that feeds on itself and creates a cascade of worsening outcomes. Over time, those who exploit it may find it difficult to control, as members of the party base become less and less trustful of elites and believe that none is sufficiently devoted to their core values.

The culmination of polarization can endanger democracy itself. If members of one political group come to view their opponents as an existential threat to their core values, they may seek to defeat them at all costs, even if it undermines normal democratic procedures. They may cease to view the opposition as legitimate and seek permanent ways to prevent it from gaining power, such as by stacking the deck in their own favor. They may become convinced that it is justifiable to circumvent the rule of law and defy checks and balances or to scale back voting rights, civil liberties, or civil rights for the sake of preserving or protecting the country as they see fit.

And then as Lieberman reflects in his very recent interview on the current political landscape that we face in the aftermath of the shooting:

There are four features that help cause democratic crises. The first is political polarization, the second is conflict over who belongs in the political community, the third is high and growing economic inequality, and the fourth is excessive executive power. At least one of these forces has been present at every moment of democratic turmoil in U.S. history.

What makes the last four years different is that all of them are present. They helped fuel Trump’s rise and were part of why the country was vulnerable to an incident like the storming of the Capitol on January 6. And unfortunately, every such event only further weakens the country’s democracy. It makes the Trump shooting even more dangerous and provocative than it otherwise would be.

So I really worry that if Trump and his people start talking about this in an inflammatory way, you could see not just sporadic attacks—which is what this shooting seems to have been—but more collective and organized forms of violence.

What is interesting is that  a number of current commentators draw the link between the current instability and then tie it back to the origins of the political community. Here is Nick Bryant, the former reporter for the BBC in New York reflecting in FP:

Now, though, I would amend my advice. I would urge young reporters to reach back even further into history. The roots of modern-day polarization, and even the origins of former President Donald Trump, can be located in the country’s troubled birth. Division has always been the default setting.

So many contemporary problems can be traced back to those founding days. U.S. democracy has become so diseased because for most of the country’s history, it has not been that healthy. “We the People,” the rousing words that opened the preamble to the Constitution, was not conceived of as an inclusive statement or catchall for mass democracy. Rather, this ill-defined term referred to what in modern terminology might be called the body politic.

So there are multiple explanations for this instance of political violence, some anchored to the founding of the nation, but most tethered to deep political polarization and dire concerns of immediate political consequences. But there is a particular difficulty, in my mind, in understanding the current circumstances and its political consequences. And to me this understanding the motivation for the shooting by Thomas Crooks. Though much scrutiny has occurred, and I am sure there is likely more to come, there does not appear to be a political motivation involved. In the most recent inquiry by a number of NYT reporters concluding 60 interviews with classmates, teachers, neighbors and officials in Bethel Park, Pa., and reviewed law enforcement bulletins and extensive school records for the article, there is no evidence to date of a political motive:

Experts who study the histories of gunmen said the emerging picture of Mr. Crooks looked more like a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.

“When somebody attacks a president, our gut instinct is to say, ‘That must be politically motivated,’” said James Densley, a founder of the Violence Project, which has compiled a comprehensive database of mass shootings. “What we might be seeing here is: This was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence, and they happened to pick a political rally.”

From the near outside – which is where I am situated, it is perplexing that so few commentators reflect on the obvious – the dramatic presence in the United States of too many guns in the country. Not ignoring this, however – and what appears to me to be the obvious as well, is the reflection by Opinion Writer for NYT, David Wallace-Wells. And he writes:

But many others were not so obviously motivated by ideology or a sense of political crusade, including the country’s deadliest attack, in Las Vegas. In Connecticut, Adam Lanza left no manifesto before marching into Sandy Hook Elementary School, and though Virginia Tech’s Seung-Hui Cho left an epic paper trail, it primarily documented deep social resentment and incel-style sexual frustration like that which pushed Elliot Rodger toward violence in the 2014 Isla Vista killings. Other rampages — including in Uvalde, Lewiston and Aurora — have been rendered in national memory not just as horrifying acts of spectacular violence but enigmatic ones, too, with inscrutable motivations.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Trump’s rally, it seems everyone had a story to tell or an argument to make about it. But conspicuously absent was the subject that often takes center stage in the wake of a shooting: guns.

Everyone knows this country is an unusually violent place, but few appreciate just how unusually so. Our gun homicide rate is 22 times as high as it is in the European Union; this means that, on a per-capita basis, for every European who is killed by a gun every year, 22 Americans are. One conservative estimate put the number of guns in America at almost 378 million, increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of households. Perhaps 44 million are AR-15-style rifles.

And while American murder rates are in long-term decline, mass shootings, though only a tiny fraction of the total, are becoming only more common. About a decade ago, it was sometimes pointed out that, contrary to the public narrative, mass shootings hadn’t meaningfully increased in America; instead, they had simply become more salient in an age of, first, cable news and, then, social media. But if you define “mass shooting” as an attack with four or more victims, killed or injured, the number more than doubled between 2014 and 2023.

Experts, analysts and opinion writers need to face these very striking figures. And, if necessary, ignore the politics.

Image Credit: The New York Times